


newspaper clippings

by clickingkeyboards



Series: Love’s Labour’s Lost [2]
Category: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Genre: Coming Out, Gen, M/M, Newspapers, Outing, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Protective Siblings, Scandal, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 10:35:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23969929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards
Summary: Somebody with leverage and a need for something that Bertie and Harold don't have owns a camera and climbs, and is apt at positioning themselves at windows to capture incriminating photos. When the Wells-Mukherjee scandal breaks, it's found that Bertie and Harold expected the news release and fled Cambridge before it got out.In a fit of panic, Daisy and George have to battle past the press and accusations while desperately trying to locate their siblings.
Relationships: Alexander Arcady & George Mukherjee, Alexander Arcady/Hazel Wong, Bertie Wells & Daisy Wells, Daisy Wells & Hazel Wong, Harold Mukherjee/Bertie Wells
Series: Love’s Labour’s Lost [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1736263
Comments: 5
Kudos: 62





	1. my death will be the fandom

_“behind my forehead’s an assortment of things i’d like to forget”_

* * *

# WELLS-MUKHERJEE SCANDAL BREAKS

_‘If this should be the death of me, love, I shouldn’t mind this being the way that I go.’_

As romantic as it seems, this quote is a part of the letters at the forefront of the Wells-Mukherjee Scandal, which has rocked England to its core as more and more evidence of an ungodly relationship are exposed in horrifying detail. Bertie Wells, the boy that everybody pitied and consoled after the Fallingford Trials, has been charged with several counts of sodomy, along with Harold Mukherje, the son of renowed doctor Sir Mangaldas Mukherjee.

‘Nobody will ever know about this, these letters, the late nights spent together, the stolen moments in dark corners, how we live and breathe each other.’

This sentence, in a letter written by Wells to Mukherjee, is part of a series of over forty letters exchanged over the extended Cambridge summer break of 1936, between Mukherjee in London and Wells in Gloucestershire. Although, from what has been evidenced so far, it looks as if Wells leads the relationship, it should not be ignored that Mukherjee was the one to instigate this twisted relationship leading from the dark alcoves of Cambridge.

‘It didn’t feel real when I asked you,’ Mukherjee wrote in a letter on the 17th of August, 1936. ‘It was almost as if something had seized me, propelled me to ask you. I remember thinking that it couldn’t have been me, that I was in no way confident enough to be the person that whispered something so daring on the rooftop of Mauldin that night in October. You make me brave, it seems.’

Although the collection of letters is incomplete, some hidden and some being held by friends of the pair at Cambridge who have yet to give them up, it is thought to contain upwards of fifty thousand words shared between the two, including poetry, page numbers given for the others to read in books, and references to the relationships of historical gay lovers.

Achilles and Patroclus are often quoted by both men in the letters, the best example being when Wells wrote this: ‘“Never bury my bones apart from yours, Achilles, let them lie together… just as we grew up together in your house.” The Iliad is full of brilliant quotes akin to that, and I have been poring over it for hours. Rather suited to our love story, wouldn’t you say? Wretched and condemned others laying together in bed and in sleep, in secret?’

Judging by the photos released to the press by an anonymous source, Wells and Mukherjee were worse at secrecy than they believed themselves to be. A series of over fifty photos were released to _The Times_ , some too ghastly and lude to show but others just horrific enough to expose the scandal.

The photo pictured at the top of this article shows Wells and Mukherjee asleep beside each other, cast forever in an act of pretending that their relationship is normal. 

Before this news story first broke in Cambridge on Saturday afternoon, Wells and Mukherjee fled Cambridge, clearly having anticipated the reveal of their relationship before it happened. On Friday afternoon after their lecture, the two claimed a spontaneous trip and left for London, and have not been seen since. 

Their contacts in Cambridge were unavailable for comment, the only interaction between them and the press being Alfred Cheng making rude gestures at reporters that followed him out of Maudlin College on Saturday evening. Newspapers have attempted to reach their parents but most were unavailable for comment, other than Lady Hastings.

“I always knew that he had strayed from the way of our Lord,” Lady Hastings said to reporters. “He was a sinful son since his teenage years, with urges that we tried to quell with scripture, but somehow he managed to deceive us all. He will be cast from the family if he dares to show his face in the country again!”

Their relationship has not come as a shock for many at Cambridge, some commenting that it was ‘disgustingly obvious’ and ‘bound to come out’. This scandal will doubtless disgrace Wells, Mukherjee, and both of their families for decades, and throw this twisted Greek tragedy of love into a disrepair destined for Hades. Good Christians can only hope that retribution comes swiftly to punish them, and Wells and Mukherjee should serve as a reminder to the nation about homosexuals getting just what they deserve: being ruined beyond repair.

This scandal has raised questions about the ultimately dismissed Fallingford Sodomy Allegations, often accompanied in the papers of the time by a crude drawing in the style of a court reporter depicting Wells kissing a chained-up Bampton with a knife in one hand. Although the charges were dismissed due to lack of evidence, the reveal of his relationship with Mukherjee has enthusiasts wondering whether there really was basis to the theory that Bampton and Wells were sodomites behind closed doors.

‘Ridiculous how much you can miss someone in ways that adults condemn,’ Wells wrote to Bampton in ‘34, in a letter that was the most concrete evidence in court of their ultimately dismissed relationship.

Bampton’s reply was, ‘If I’ll break the law for anybody, it’s you. Their condemnation is baseless and we are right for how we are.’

A sentence that carries such a despicable meaning should be a thing of fiction, but instead it is the horrifying reality that was overlooked by court officials of the time. 

As Wells is a sinner twice over, there is no room for doubt that this may be a phase. He describes himself as a sinner with a twisted sore of pride in his words that only a man such as himself could ever take joy in. 

‘We are sinners, in both of our religions, there’s no two ways about it,’ Wells said in a letter on the 23rd of August. ‘I’ll burn in Hell as a Christian while you live another life as a Hindu, and I’ll imagine that the fires are the warmth of you.’

In his letter of reply, Mukherjee said, ‘It would be so much easier to be somebody else, somebody with white skin and more respectable attractions, but then I wouldn’t have you. I wouldn’t trade this for anything. As we’re so addicted to quotes from tragedies, I’ll leave you with this quote of The Bard’s from _Love’s Labour’s Lost_ : ‘When Love speaks, the voice of all the gods, Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.’ We won’t feel so miserable and condemned one day, and you can look to that day and hold your breath until we can breathe air freely then, hand-in-hand.’

‘Maybe one day, the nation will know about us.’

That day has come sooner than Wells would have liked.

* * *

_“your knight in shining plastic”_


	2. ruinin’ me completely (it’s true)

_"no one cares what i want, just what i’ve got”_

* * *

“George!” Alex shouts, rushing up to me as I start out of our dorm after spending our chapel period reading in there. “You ought to go back. You don’t want to face any teachers or students, nor right now.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Hastings,” I say, trying to push past him while shooting him my darkest glare. “I don’t want to get beaten, do I? Not when Twining stopped barely a year ago.”

There is a sharp note in his voice as he grabs me by the shoulder far more roughly than he ever has before. “George!” he snaps. “You need to listen to me; this isn’t up for negotiation. Stay _the fuck_ in our dorm. The morning papers are saying— George, there’s been a scandal.”

It feels like a punch to the stomach, knocking all the wind out of me in a gasp as the world pinwheels around me.

“No.”

* * *

“Daisy!” Hazel yells, breathless as she bursts into the dorm after assessing the chaotic clamour outside. “Don’t go out of the dorm. Please.”

“What?” I ask, frowning and folding my arms. I don’t like to assume that things are Hazel being dramatic but this is just ridiculous. “Why shouldn’t I?”

As her shoulders heave up and down, heavy as she caught her breath, her flushed cheeks don’t lose their red tinge. For all my abilities, I can hardly think what would cause her to flush so harshly. “The newspapers… there’s photos. _Incriminating_ ones.”

My heart lurches desperately in my chest, and I can hardly breathe as I realise what’s happened, and I feel like I should die.

“No.”

* * *

Despite my intention to heed Alex’s warnings, I can’t sit in the dark for longer than ten minutes. I have to see what is ruining us, what they’re saying about my favourite person in all the world. It’s impossible to sit tight in our dorm room, staring around at all my belongings, not _knowing_ . A fountain pen from Harold, a mufti suit jacket from Harold, a satchel that used to be Harold’s, a leather-bound Christie novel from Harold. It’s all around me, choking me, a reminder of what I’m about to lose. _Harold, Harold, Harold_.

I find myself hurtling down the stairs and towards the dining hall barely ten minutes later. All heads turn to me, staring with wide eyes, as I rush through the open double doors, as put together as ever but with an unmistakable air of franticness about me. “Alex!” I gasp out as he rises from his seat and rushes to me, hands already halfway raised to push me back out of the room. Although I’m astonished to hear the almost tearful desperation in my own voice, I push on and find the words tumbling out of my mouth unchecked. _Asking. Pleading. Begging_. “I need to see it, Alex. Please. I need to see what he’s done.”

With an irritated sigh to mask the concern in blue eyes, he snatches up a newspaper from the nearest table and the clamour of the students silences in an instant, staring at the spectacle that I make by existing. Waiting with bated breath to hear what I have to say about my brother, the former Head Boy, being involved in a scandal. Hundreds of students take in a breath in unison as Alex reads out the headline. “Scandal at Maudlin College — the son of a knighted doctor and the boy of the Fallingford Scandal fall into disreputation.”

I feel my breath hitch with a choked gasp as I move to snatch it from his hand, only for him to pull it to his chest. “Are there photos?” I ask, though I know the answer before the words pass my lips. No scandal about homosexuality breaks without photographic evidence. “Who took them?”

“At a guess?” he asks, glancing down and scanning the columns for a name to put to the mystery snitch. “They’re anonymous. Who hates Bertie that isn’t in prison or dead? Harold’s in most people’s good books, isn’t he? What about Cheng?”

I feel my head shake more than I know that I’ve done it, and it’s so heavy I may as well be underwater. _Think straight_ , I tell myself. _Don’t panic._ My body is numbed with a cold shock that spreads to the tips of my fingers and placates every corner of my mind. “No, that’s idiotic. He may be cold but he likes them both. Price?”

“Don’t be stupid. She clearly used to have a fancy for Bertie.”

“All the more reason. Bitter revenge, spiteful vengeance, revenge for the fact that she couldn’t have him?”

“Idiotic,” he says, and my eyes snap to him. He rarely says things like that aloud. “She forges essays and writes complaint letters. She doesn’t take photos like… this.”

This time, I’m fast. I shoot my hand out and rip the paper from his hands, and I’m holding it up to read it by the time he reaches out to grab it back.

When I look down, I almost wish that I hadn’t.

#  **SCANDAL AT MAUDLIN COLLEGE**

_The son of a knighted doctor and the boy of the Fallingford Scandal fall into disreputation._

Harold Mukherjee was a scholar at St. Johns and a decorated graduate of Weston School for Boys, expected to grow into a prestigious historian, well-respected in high-class circles and a credit to the Mukherjee family name, carrying out the family legacy of Sir Mangaldas Mukherjee, a knighted doctor. He and his younger brother — George Mukherjee, a Weston student in his fifth year and a friend of decorated Honourable, Daisy Wells — were expected to both graduate Cambridge four years apart and go on to climb career ladders, marry respectable women, and continue the Mukherjee family legacy, a hope for British Indian families across the country.

This dream looks unlikely now that Harold Mukherjee has fled Cambridge in the wake of exposed letters, unmistakable photographic evidence, and sodomy allegations levelled against him and the star of the Fallingford Scandal last summer: The Honourable Albert Wells.

“Goodness… no way of them claiming that it’s bunkum, is it?”

“Not unless those photos are magically doctored,” he says, looking up at me with eyes that are shining with unshed tears. I don’t want to admit it, but I know that my eyes must be welling with tears too. “They’ve fled Cambridge.

 _I know_ , I want to snap at him, throw the paper in his face and shove him as hard as I could. But I know that it’s only misplaced anger. My anger at the world is trying to bubble over, spill from my mouth and burn from my hands, and I cannot let it. Alexander will be my only ally when the rest of the world turns against me, and I can’t lose him too. “Of course they have.”

“They were found gone on Friday night,” he explains, and I’m suddenly grateful that he read the entire article when I couldn’t bring myself to. “They were claiming a trip, and the news broke this morning, Sunday. They knew it was going to happen.”

What can I do but hold back tears and force myself to read the rest of the article, try to make out the words through blurred vision and discern the letters despite my shaking hands?

I can barely read it, but I owe it to my brother to try.

* * *

I can’t wait any longer. Every muscle in my body is twitching and aching, begging me to move because sitting tight while my brother is drowning in scandal is wrong. It feels like a betrayal of everything I know to be true: I am confident and I get to the bottom of everything, my brother is clever and more than able to hide his relationship, my Hazel would never keep anything from me.

My mind burns as I think of what these photos entail, whether there are letters involved, how long my brother will be convicted for.

_ I would have got fifteen years for Stephen,  _ I remember him saying.  _ Thirty if there had been photographic evidence. I’ll never be with a man with the curtains open ever again in my life. _

Surely he wouldn’t.

_ Surely he wouldn’t be so careless. _

But I’ve seen it. I naturally spend my time effortlessly paying attention to everything and everyone, and I’ve seen his carelessness, his daring moments of brazen hand-holding in public, the way they put their hands on the other’s waist when they think nobody’s looking. 

There is something about Harold Mukherjee that makes my brother reckless, and he’s paying the price for it now. 

I’ve watched their push-and-pull dynamic religiously, felt the certainty of it under my fingertips and assessed the tension in the room. If Stephen and Bertie were connected by an elastic band of Indian rubber, one that pulled thinner and thinner before snapping, then Bertie and Harold are connected by a length of climbing rope. It doesn’t pull or change shape, they can never move too far from the other, and they can securely rely on that tether always pulling them together, keeping them close.

I paid attention when Hazel and I visited at the very start of September, I watched the way that they would be outed to the world if someone thought to pay just a slight more attention to them.

I remember, because I remember everything, watching Harold shift closer to him, and seeing Bertie push him away with a warning look. I remember, because I always pay attention, how Harold tugged on his sleeve and Bertie twisted out of his grasp with a glare, a look in his eyes of _I wish we could_. I remember, because it was impossible not to notice for a genius like me, how they were distracted while they contributed to our conversation, how their eyes drifted to each other and their sentences trailed off when they caught sight of the other, intimate though they kept a respectable distance from each other. I remember, because it was so blatantly obvious, how Harold scrawled something on a piece of paper and slipped out of the room with the excuse of using the lavatory. I remember, because somebody like me picks up on these intricate details, how Bertie looked at the paper and waited five minutes, and then slipped from the room too, tossing the piece of paper carelessly on the fire as he left.

_ Obvious. _

Harold Mukherjee makes my brother reckless, and he’ll pay for it with his freedom.

I’m painfully aware of every movement I make, the left-right-left-right march of my feet on the ground, my arms swinging, my plaits against my back, and I feel every breath and each beat of my heart as I walk to the dining hall. The cool metal of the door handle almost stings under my palm, and the dining hall goes silent when I throw open the door.

I always want to do that with grandeur and dramatic glare, but these are hardly the circumstances for it. Hazel is at my side in an instant, and she wraps her arms around me and she  _ knows _ . She knows that no comfort will do from anybody but Bertie right now. Although she has been silly recently, beside herself with the thought of Alexander coming to Egypt with us, she knows me better than she knows herself, and I can always rely on that. Despite my desperation, Hazel is sure and secure, small and stout and comfortably solid to lean against, and just what I need when everything else is collapsing.

“ _ Daisy _ ,” she says, and she squeezes me tightly. “Oh…  _ Daisy _ .”

“Where is he?” I ask, and my words falter, come out thick and heavy.

Stepping back, she reaches up and brushes tears off my face with warm hands, before reaching into her pocket and handing me her handkerchief. “No one knows, Daisy. They’ve fled Cambridge.”

“They’ve  _ what _ ?” I blurt, all outrage. “I need to see a newspaper. Now.”

She wastes no time in snatching a newspaper from the table of First Year shrimps and offering it out. “Here. You aren’t going to like it.”

“Hazel, I don’t  _ care _ ,” I snap, and I take it from her hands and read the headline, bold as brass and utterly unforgiving. 

#  **FALLINGFORD STRIKES AGAIN**

_ Echoes of the Fallingford Scandal continue to bring misfortune upon the Wells family. _

‘Fallingford follows me everywhere I go, H, and I don’t think I shall ever escape.’

Bertie Wells wrote this to Harold Mukherjee mid-August of ‘36, in a series of over forty letters of which only a sporadic fifteen have been obtained by the press.

After the Fallingford Scandal last Easter, Bertie Wells seemed keen to shake off all mention of Stephen Bampton, Denis Curtis, and sodomy allegations in favour of beginning a scholarly life at Cambridge. However, it turns out that he had ruined the Wells family name once again by carrying on behind closed doors with Harold Mukherjee, the son of Sir Mangaldas Mukherjee, a British-Indian neurosurgeon.

The story of the Fallingford Scandal and the never ending strong of bad luck that it has inspired will haunt the Wells family for decades to come, tarnishing their reputation and blackening their name.

‘I could never hurt Daisy, and it kills me to know that revealing our relationship would hurt her so deeply. Even if we set aside everything else, Daisy will suffer and I could never bear that.’

Despite his best efforts, details of Wells and his scandalous lifestyle have reached the press and will doubtless bring the famous Honorable Daisy Wells to tears of shock and disgrace that her brother is a temperamental man.

Fallingford strikes again.

I feel myself crumple, my body almost giving out entirely as I am struck by seeing my brother’s name and face plastered on the front pages. I don’t mind that he is pictured asleep in bed with a man, only that the world has been this part of him that belongs so intimately to Harold. 

“Oh. Oh,  _ Bertie _ .”

Hazel, more forcefully than she has ever done before, grabs me by the sleeve of my Deepdean blazer and drags me from the dining hall, and both of us are out of breath by the time we’re back in our dorm.

“Daisy…” she says, clear as crystal, and it shatters the haze that my perfect mind has somehow fallen into.

Something odd and tight and emotional snaps inside my chest and I break all at once. “WHY WASN’T HE MORE CAREFUL, HAZEL?” I find myself yelling, and my voice rolls around the room and reverberates back to the emptiness inside my own head. “HE KNOWS THAT HE’S LIVING A LIFE WHERE HE HAS TO TAKE CARE. WHY DIDN’T HE?”

“You aren’t really angry at him, Daisy,” she says to me softly, and she takes my hands between both her own and squeezes them tightly. “You’re angry at the world and what it’s done to him. And who did this to him.”

“What’s the point in making this a case?” I say, astonished by the words coming out of my own mouth. I  _ never  _ avoid a case. Hazel is astonished too, if her slack jaw and very pink face are anything to go by. “It won’t bring him back into polite society.”

“But we can bring whoever did this to justice.” Her voice is firm and correct and so much like how I sounded in Hong Kong that I want to cry.

My voice is very small, too small for the Honourable Daisy Wells, when I say, “This shouldn’t have happened. This can’t happen. This can’t happen because he’s my brother and things have to go right for him.”

Her arms are around me in an instant, and she whispers, “I know, Daisy. I know.”

* * *

_ ”and if we sit and count it up, it’s really not a lot” _


	3. i think i love you so

_“let’s talk about your parents and your future dreams”_

* * *

**DAISY**

Something hurts in my chest that’s deeper than my heart, a great unknown of hurt and fury and anger at the unfairness of it all lodged somewhere in my ribcage. It’s illogical, for I know that I have chambers in my heart and blood in my veins and air in my lungs, but I can’t help but feel like my heart is beating poison and I would bleed curses if cut, and as if I breathe something between chlorine gas and carbon dioxide.

I feel hollow from rage and filled to bursting with unshed tears, and the this-and-that and up-and-down is tearing me up and knitting me back together, and I just want to feel one thing instead of several at once.

“Daisy,” Hazel says, and she reaches forward to take my hands, the pads of her fingers pressing into my palms, which are slick with sweat. “Daisy. We need to call Weston. George has never been through a scandal before, and he’s _Indian_. This is going to destroy him.”

My breath catches in my throat, and I curse until the words come up and the syllables unstick. “ _Fuck_. Watson, I… how did you think of that before me?”

“Because my brother’s life secret wasn’t just revealed to an entire country, Daisy.” Her voice wavers but her grip stays strong, and it feels like my bones should break from how tight she squeezes my hands. “Daisy, we need to call Weston.”

“ _Of course_ ,” I breathe, still furious with myself for not thinking of it first. “It’s only a pity that Alexander will be there too.”

Frowning at me, she says, “You don’t really mean that.”

“No. You’re right, I don’t.”

* * *

**GEORGE**

“We need to call Deepdean,” I say, because it’s all I can think of to _do_. There’s hardly much else that I can grasp at to solve this case: working out the culprit won’t bring my brother back into polite society. It’s useless to pretend otherwise, and I know that Alex won’t try to convince me that I can save him.

“Oh lord,” Alex breaths, and I know what he means in an instant. Will they have seen it? Hazel told us that Deepdean doesn’t distribute newspapers like Weston does, because they don’t think that ladies should worry their pretty little heads about current events.

In an instant, he’s out the door and I follow him, and we’re running, running, running to the reception to get to a telephone. When we reach it, Alex gasps the address to an operator and hands the phone to me. “They’ll be okay,” he says, and we both hear the empty promise in his tone. “I swear.”

“That means nothing right now, Alex.”

“I know.”

The call connects, and a strict voice comes across the line. “Matron for Deepdean School for Girls, how may I help you?”

“Could I please speak to Daisy Wells?” I say, the disorder in my mind only vaguely able to choke out a request that barely makes sense.

“She— ah, isn’t currently available, sir, I’ll see what I can—”

I cut her off, forcing my breath to steady. “My name is George Mukherjee and I _need_ to speak to Daisy Wells.”

“Ah.” There is a sharp sound of the receiver being set down, and I hear a disjointed yell of, “DAISY WELLS! THERE IS A MISTER MUKHERJEE ON THE PHONE FOR YOU!”

Laughter ripples across the phone line from a hundred giggling students, and then there is a rush and a clatter and Daisy says, “George?” Her voice is more desperate than I have ever heard it, a gasp and a hitch edged with tears, and I find myself crying too, tears dripping onto my hands, knuckles pressed against my cheek as I grip the receiver like a lifeline.

“Daisy?”

She lets out a huge rush of breath. “Oh god. George, what do we _do_?”

“We need to find them. But _how_?”

“Call everyone you can. The Master of Mauldin, the Master of St. Johns, Amanda, Alfred, Freddie Savage… oh, even call Wormwood Scrubs. Bertie’s an idiot, he might have gone there. Do you have any idea of who would have taken the photos?”

It is the first time I have ever not _known_. “Not a clue. You?”

“I’m working on it. Oh, and, if either of our parents ask for information, if we _have_ anything by then… don’t tell them a _jot_ of it. Lord knows what they’ll do to them once they’re found.”

“Good luck, Daisy.”

She pauses, and goes to speak, and I have to cut her off or I will feel myself shatter beyond repair. “Don’t say anything. I know.”

* * *

**FELIX**

“You’re back early, Felix dear,” Lucy comments as I close the front door to our flat, throwing the paper down on the table. “Did you get the shopping I asked for? You’re practically running Britain, I shouldn’t think that Marmite is too much of a hardship.”

“You’re still a heathen for liking it, Lucy dear,” I say in a voice that shakes a little too much, and she notices. Of course she does; she knows me like the back of her hand, able to pick apart my tone in a fraction of a second and assemble my train of thought from the pieces.

She turns around sharply. “What is it, Felix?”

My body feels as if it’s made of lead, and it’s all I can do to helplessly gesture at the newspaper while pressing a hand over my face, stumbling back until my shoulders hit the wall and I lean against it like the only thing holding back the tsunami of emotions that threaten to spring forward.

On the front page of the London Times is _WELLS-MOUNTFITCHET SCANDAL BREAKS_ in bold, unforgiving letters, and a picture printed black and white of my nephew pressed up against another man, taken from his waist and upwards of him and Harold Mukherjee — a sensible and strict scholarly _friend_ of his — both shirtless and deep in a kiss as if there is no one else in the world.

It feels as if the world should end.

* * *

**HAZEL**

While Daisy is on the phone to Amanda Price, Beanie, Kitty, and Lavinia appear at the door. Beanie is clutching the newspaper, while Kitty is brandishing a copy of _Abercrombie_.

“Is she okay?” Beanie asks me, her eyes enormous with worry.

“Fine,” Daisy growls, moving the phone away from her face to answer, and then gesturing for me to crowd around the receiver too.“Calling Bertie’s friends.”

“I don’t know where he is,” Amanda tells us. “When they ran away, they left Alf and I a letter. Telling us that someone had been taking photos of them. There were no letters or anything attached to the story at that point, it was just the photos. We broke the lock on his window and ripped apart his room for anything incriminating. We took forty-seven letters, split between his room and Harold’s, and I’m hiding them right now. They haven’t left my person since Friday. The letters that the press got hold of were found in places that we didn't have time to check before we were chased out of their separate rooms by breeders and porters. We found the letters that were best-hidden first, knowing that they would be the most private. We took some photos of them kissing, ones that they took themselves at the photomaton. Alfred stole the keys to Maudlin from Mr Perkins’ cubby and locked the doors to Mauldin to keep the screaming reporters out. All the students are leaving around the back of the college. I’ve been walking around with trousers with all my hair up in one of Alf’s caps, so no reporters will accost me and grab my bag.”

She takes an enormous breath and Daisy says, “Thank you, Amanda. Really. I don’t say it often but… thank you.”

“What’s Amanda done?” Lavinia asks.

I sit back down on the floor, leaning my head on Daisy’s knee.

“A lot,” Daisy replies sharply, thanking her again and hanging up. “George is calling Alfred.”

“What are you doing?” Kitty asks, walking into Matron’s office and sitting up on the desk in an astonishing display of impropriety that abs me fanning my face to fight off the sudden flush as I look anywhere but at her.

Straightening up and swallowing hard because it wouldn’t do to seem at all shaken around the others, Daisy tells her, “We’re trying to find Bertie. And Harold. It’s not going well but we will find them. I know we will.”

I nod firmly too, sitting cross-legged and folding my arms. “We will. Absolutely.” Forcing all my belief into my voice makes it sound wooden. 

“Good luck with that,” Lavinia says, sounding more sincere than I have ever heard her. As she should, Daisy would say. 

Looking like she’s about to deliver particularly bad news, Kitty holds out her magazine, folded back to show a particular page. “It came in the post this morning. The Saturday edition.”

Daisy picks it up, sees the headline, and hands it back to Kitty. _BERTIE WELLS SODOMY ALLEGATIONS_ , is emblazoned across the top, along with some of the more shocking photos crowding either side of the column.

“That’s quite enough for one day,” Daisy says stiffly, and her voice sounds rather shallow and small.

“Daisy,” I ask, kneeling in front of her chair and taking her hands from where they sit in her lap, “are you all right?”

“Perfectly, Watson,” she replies, and bursts into tears.

* * *

_“i’m interested but distant to a fault”_


	4. worth all of the long nights

_“you’re my confidante, so let’s talk, share secrets”_

* * *

**AMANDA**

It’s six in the morning and I can hardly breathe.

In my hands is a letter, and I can hardly breathe.

It was pushed into my room, through the small gap between the window frame and the brickwork, and I can hardly breathe.

Dear Amanda and Alfred,

When I tell you that we’ve run away, take me seriously and do not try to find us to talk us out of this.

I’m writing this in between a chaos of booking tickets, packing our cases, and trying to resist the temptation to just walk off the roof of Maudlin and leave this problem to the world. Apologies if I’m not entirely coherent.

Someone has been taking photos of us.

I don’t know how else to explain it. If you fancy some sleuthing, we know that they’re a climber and that they need money. But who doesn’t these days, with a war on the horizon.

On Tuesday, Harold received a letter with the late post. It contained an enormous stack of photos of us, most that I can’t even include. They asked for money, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of pounds. The Mukherjees are well-off, and so is my uncle. But nobody has that sort of money, and no one has the other things they asked us for. They asked for horrendous, dark things, things that not even my Uncle Felix’s connections could get them. If we didn’t give them what they wanted by Friday, they would go to the papers.

We tried. We tried so hard to rake together the money, to chase the trail backwards. Harold tried to follow up the letter but that went dead, and I couldn’t find anything in regards to the photos, not without showing them to someone. Putting together all of our funds didn’t make up even a quarter of what they asked for.

One of the photos is enclosed, the least awful-looking one.

We have no time to get hold of everything incriminating, but the letters are scattered through our rooms. If you can get hold of them, do. If you can’t, don’t worry.

I’m sorry to throw you into this. I hope that, by the time the news breaks, we’ll be well out of the scope of people searching for us. I don’t want to end up in the scrubs next to Stephen. Harold sends his love, and says that we’ll be fine if we have each other.

I mourn for Daisy and her reputation, and Harold mourns for George and how he’ll fare. We’re doing the best that we can. The copies of the photos that we were sent are in my top desk drawer, and the most incriminating letters are in our rooms in the places that any Cambridge student would hide something if it was truly awful. You both know the sorts of places.

Don’t chase us to London.

Love to both of you,

Bertie  
x

I stagger to sit down on the ground, leaning up against the wall under the windowsill as I take the photo from the envelope and hold it in shaking hands. The photo isn’t too astonishing, but it hits me full force like a blow to the chest as I imagine this photo and photos worse than this on the cover of every publication in the country.

I can hardly breathe.

I have one lecture today, a lecture I could easily skip. The window is suddenly tempting, and I can climb in a skirt with I try.

My friends’ ruined life is on a piece of photo paper in front of me, and I can hardly breathe.

* * *

**ALFRED**

Amanda Price can hardly breathe, and I find myself caring.

A letter is pressed into my hands, covered in raindrops and tears, and I find myself caring.

The pieces of someone’s life are on the coffee table in my rooms, and I find myself caring.

“They couldn’t pay, so they ran,” she explains, and I reach out to tactfully turn the photo face-down on the table. On the back, there is a number. It’s the fourteenth photo of  _ five hundred _ .

Reaching out for my climbing shoes, I say, “So we go and break into their rooms. Who knows when the news will break?”

“Good idea.” Amanda tugs her cap down further over her tucked up hair. “Got any trousers that I can borrow? John’s is a pain to climb.”

“You’re much more clever than everyone else would have me believe, doll,” I reply as I walk towards my bedroom. 

She throws a coaster at my back. “No pet names, Cheng.”

I stare at the letter on the table and feel dread creeping into my bones. At Christmas, I didn’t care. I knew that it couldn’t be anybody I cared about, and I certainly didn’t care a jot for the Melling siblings. Even when I was almost arrested, I was calm because I trusted the detectives that weren’t the idiot PC Cross. But this?

This is an untrodden path of fear that will  _ never _ end up alright, and I don’t know how to cope with that. 

* * *

**AMANDA**

Alfred rips off the lock on Bertie’s window, using a clever trick with fishing wire and a lot of swearing. When we tumble inside, it looks as if a hurricane has ripped though his rooms. Everything has vanished from his room, and the papers and missing from his desk drawers.

Alfred starts towards his bedroom, looking inside the mattress and pulling back the bed to check behind the headboard. “I’ve found a few letters, ‘Manda!”

Remembering his letter, I rush towards the desk and pull out an enormous stack of photos bound with a rubber band. The top one is as plain as the one he included, and I flip through the pile, watching them get more and more astonishing. By the end of the pile, I have to stop. It feels like an evil intrusion, even though the entirety of the British public will have their hands on these in perhaps a few days’ time. Underneath the photos is a string of photos from a photomaton—or photo booth, as those a few years younger than me call the contraption—of them kissing. It’s intimate. Sweet. Close. More than when I was looking at the photos, I feel like I’m looking at something I shouldn’t be seeing. They consented to these photos being taken, taking them with a contraption that doesn’t let anybody else see the negatives. I tuck the photos into the pile, swearing to myself to send them to Bertie and Harold as soon as I know where they are.

It’s a sweet memory, and they deserve to make many more. 

Alfred comes out of the bedroom and says, “I’ve got… twenty-four letters here. We should go to John’s and come back here, it’s better to get as many as we can from both rooms and leave a few than leave  _ all _ the letters in Harold’s room.”

I nod. My lecture seems unimportant right now. “Good idea.”

* * *

**ALFRED**

We collect twenty-three letters from Harold’s room. By the time we rush back to Maudlin, the Master of Maudlin has barred the door. He barks at us that the police are coming, and we know that we must leave whatever letters are left over in Bertie’s rooms, some his and some Harold’s.

The police arrive in a barrage of boots and Amanda is sent away. We lock away the letters and photos into chests and suitcases, and sew the keys into the linings of our coats.

We can hardly make eye contact on Saturday. Something is coming.

* * *

**AMANDA**

The news breaks on Sunday. I buy the paper at six in the morning and climb the drainpipe to Alfred’s room to hammer on the window as hard as I can.

He steals the keys from the porter. We lock the doors to the staircase. He explains the story to everyone on the staircase, and we peer out the peephole to see the screaming reporters congregating in the courtyard.

With my hair up in a cap, looking as like-a-boy as possible, I buy every paper I can throughout the day. They haven’t been found.

Daisy Wells and George Mukherjee call. They beg us not to tell their parents a word of their search. When the Mountfitchets, the Hastings, the Mukherjees call the college and are connected to their sons’ associates, we don’t breathe a word.

We can hardly breathe, but we are breathing together.

We sit together all of Sunday, sharing a dish smuggled up from the Hall for an early lunch and not looking each other in the eye.

Suddenly, something occurs to me.

“Do you think that they’ve… Mukherjee speaks French, doesn’t he?”

Alfred’s eyes glitter. “Manda, you’re brilliant. Who do we tell?”

We call the Mountfitchets but the phone is engaged. When we eventually get through, an irritated maid told us that they’re waiting for the arrival of Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong, and don’t have the  _ time  _ for journalists.

We put down the phone, and Alfred has a grim slash of an expression on his face. “ _ Lord _ .”

“Do you want a hug?” I ask, raising an eyebrow as best I can.

“Let’s ignore the impropriety of all this,” he says, chuckling weakly as he wraps his arms around me.

“Is propriety high on our list of worries right now?”

* * *

_“i had 101 wishes and lost them all on you”_


	5. tying our breath in knots again

**_ “’til my breath feels useless” _ **

* * *

**HAZEL**

“Daisy is blue in the face; I’ve never known her to shout so much.”

“George has lost his breath and he can hardly talk, his throat is so sore. Hasn’t stopped him trying, of course.”

“Daisy’s threatening to run away from Deepdean.”

“George has ignored  _ ten _ calls from the Mukherjees.”

We aren’t trying to one-up each other, though it feels like we should be. All we can do tell each other how our best friends have reacted to the scandal, tell the stories of bloody scratches and screaming matches with nothing, because there is nothing else that can be one.

“I think I should go,” Alexander says, sounding despondent. From the other end, I hear a scramble and a shout. “George is arguing with one of the office attendants, they’re trying to force him to call his folks. GEORGE! For goodness SAKE, George—”

Abruptly, the line falls dead.

I stare at the receiver in my hand, contemplating the image of George losing his cool, yelling and shouting that he won’t call his folks, that he  _ won’t put my brother in jail, are you insane? _ Just as I set it down, considering how the students are taking the news of their old head boy being at the forefront of a  _ terribly improper  _ scandal, Daisy rushes into the room, her plaits in chaos and her boater in her hand. The phone starts to ring again, all I can think of is Alexander, and Daisy’s unusually flustered presence is enormous in front of me, and I gabble out, “Alexander said that the phone is ringing and asked if you’re okay?”

Daisy looks at me as if I have two heads. “ _ What, _ Hazel?” For a moment, she looks utterly normal. As if the weight of the world isn’t on her shoulders.

“I rang Alexander, and George is taking the news even worse than you. He freaked out, in the way… in that way that  _ you _ do, and scratched his arm quite violently. Currently, he’ll be putting up a fight because he doesn’t want to call his people. You look like you need a hug. The phone is ringing.” Dissecting the three things makes everything seem simpler, and Daisy laughs very suddenly.

“Idiot!” she says, not unkindly. “Did you mix those three statements into one?”

I nod, and she laughs even harder. “You can hug me later.” With that, she stalks across the room in a swish of blonde hair and snatches up the phone. “Deepdean School for Girls, Daisy Wells speaking.”

“Daisy,” said a grave and serious voice, and we both jumped.

“Uncle Felix?” I said weakly.

“You need to be on a train to London this instant. We have to sort this out.”

Daisy gasps, and it sounds strangled to my ear. I put a hand on her arm, and she straightens up again, glaring at me in a way that lets me know she doesn’t mean it at all. “Why should we?”

The implicit addition of me makes me smile despite the circumstances.

“Because your brother is in danger, Daisy,” he says with a snap, so loud that the phone line gives and whines back at us for a moment. “I can’t help you help him if you aren’t here.”

_ Help you help him _ . That gives me a twisting sort of fuzzy feeling in my gut. He’s putting us in charge. Dimly, I think that I don’t want to be in charge of a national scandal, but then Daisy sparkles at me and I  _ know _ that we are simply the best people for the job.

“Alright, Uncle Felix. Are our tickets waiting?” she asks, breathless and excited. Her eyes are lit up with brilliance, as if on a case.

He responds, although it blurs through my excitement and confusion and I don’t quite hear his response. In typical Daisy fashion, Daisy hangs up the phone without a goodbye and rushes out of the room, grabbing my wrist and dragging me behind her.

She doesn’t explain. I am accustomed to that.

* * *

As Daisy throws together a case full of clothes, directing me to do the same, she talks and talks until she is breathless. “I could hear the underlying panic in his tone, Watson. I know that I have nothing to fear.” Daisy knows, as instinctively as I do, that one of the four people her uncle will ever abuse his position for is in trouble, and that he will stop at nothing to find Bertie and give him an uninterrupted passage to wherever he needs to run to in order to be safe.

Uniform is changed out for fashionable mufti, and a smart hat with a coil of her golden hair tucked up underneath it in a plait. She ties the bow at the back of my dress and tucks our jade pin back in my hair, and we rush down the stairs with our hands pressed to our hats, shouting into the common room to our dormmates. Lavinia grumbles a gruff goodbye and gives us her surprisingly genuine well wishes. Beanie flings herself on me and demands that we come back soon, and then she whispers that she hopes Bertie is okay and that he seems very nice. It didn’t shock me, not one bit. Kitty presses her magazine into Daisy’s hands and says, “Dormmates forever,” and kisses her cheek, squeezing her hands where they’re clasping onto the magazine like a lifeline.

I remember that Kitty and Daisy spent a year together at Deepdean before I arrived.

Matron rushes us to Deepdean train station and we’re hurtling towards London on the train within the hour. It’s fast and buffeting and I feel very sick all of a sudden. Daisy takes the window seat but doesn’t look out of it like she usually does, as if she’s in a book. Instead, she resolutely blinks shining eyes and leans against me. I tuck an arm around her shoulder and feel her dose off against me, and hope desperately that I am not violently sick on this journey.

* * *

**ALEXANDER**

I didn’t expect much from the Mukherjees. George is still furious at them. The last time he was this angry at his parents was when they got into an argument about communism during the Easter holidays earlier this year. When he told Harold about it, his response was being ‘not at all astonished, you idiot’. This is somehow worse.

I pressed myself up against his side while he was calling them. I thought that he was going to bite me from the way he looked at me when I did — it felt as though we were regressing back to when he was eleven, and would slap anybody that tried to do more than shake his hand.

“You must come to London at once, George — bring Alexander if you must, the boy is sensible.  _ He _ talks to you more than he talks to us; you must give all the information that you have to the police, so that he can be found—”

“And prosecuted?” George asked, sounding stoutly unimpressed.

“Of course.”

George agreed and then slammed down the phone, slammed his fist into his palm, and said, “Well, we ought to pack. Come on, Hastings.”

“You’re quiet,” I tell him as he neatly packs his suitcase.

“I’m thinking,” he snaps. “Hush. Let the genius work.”

* * *

Matron calls us just as George brightens and says, “Alex, I have just had a brilliant idea.”

I grin at him and say, “Do we have a train to get on?”

In lieu of answering, he takes an enormous breath and pockets his handkerchief for the first time since he got the news. “Are you up for breaking some rules, Alex?”

“Can’t be worse than we’re already dealing with,” I say as we rush down the stairs.

He shoots me the dirtiest look I have ever seen, but I know he doesn’t mean it. “You’re infuriating.”

“You love me really,” I tease, and he reaches out to yank on my hair. Matron snaps at him for it, but he doesn’t seem to care. With hard eyes and his jaw set, he looks like a man on a mission. I think, as we rush to catch a taxi that will take us to the train station, that anybody standing off against George Mukherjee and Daisy Wells right now should be afraid for their life. They would be mad as March hares not to, with those two standing strong and out for blood to get revenge on behalf of Bertie and Harold.

Anybody with good sense should run for their life (although they would still never escape), and this crime speaks of a tidy, clinical mind, so I imagine that they already are.

* * *

On the train, George chooses seats tucked into shadow. He tips his trilby hat low over his eyes and buries his hands in his pockets, hiding his face from every watchful eye. I pull papers out of bins and buy them from every stand at every station we stop at on the way to London.

“I can’t believe my parents,” George spits with bitter contempt. “So he can be  _ found and prosecuted _ ? Why, I’m sorry to share a surname with them!”

With a sour sting, we both know that they would prosecute without question.

“They’re dutiful citizens of the law,” he says, so furious that his hands shake. When he’s sure that we are safe, he pulls out a sheaf of Harold’s letters to him. They’re meticulously ordered and well-kept, indicative of how seriously he took keeping Harold’s secret safe. “And they believe that I am one too.” For a detective, George is more willing to break the law than anybody else I know. 

I admire him for it.

“Why wouldn’t they?” he continues, gripping the material of his trousers so hard his knuckles turn white. “What is  _ their own flesh and blood  _ in the face of the law? No matter that policemen have beat down my people for years, all they care about is punishing Harold!”

“I’m sorry.”

Together, we leaf through Harold’s letters to George for any clue to where he and Bertie may have fled to. There has to be something, any clue at all, but it doesn’t seem to be something that we can find. No matter how desperate we are. Judging by George’s white-knuckled grip on my wrist, the answer to that is very desperate indeed.

* * *

_ “i never thought i’d let myself wear the weak look but i guess if the shoe fits” _


	6. saying that aloud is probably gonna hurt me

_ “i don’t think people realise how they’re fucking us up” _

* * *

**ALEXANDER**

When we reach Waterloo, George hauls down our cases and says, “Ready?”

Rolling my eyes, knowing his plan, I reply, “Of course. Right out of the entrance beside that restaurant and straight to the taxi ranks?”

With an affirming nod from George, I take off through the station with him hot on my heels. Through the hubbub in the station and the people waving newspapers left and right, I catch a glimpse of George’s parents, waiting for us just where we thought they would wait for us. I point them out to George and he hisses, ducking behind a man pushing boxes on a trolley and apologising frantically for the ensuing chaos.

We skid around a corner to the taxi rank and George climbs in the back of one, paying the driver with far too much money but not caring in the slightest. I join him and we don’t speak, and we are soon hurtling through London with our hands on our hats, ignoring the shouts and the bustling on the radio, the driver making conversation about the scandal.

We can only pray that Felix Mountfitchet is as accepting as he seems.

* * *

**HAZEL**

Uncle Felix hustles us into the dining room, where Aunt Lucy is waiting as if one half of a war council, newspaper clippings spread out around her. “Detectives, we need your help,” Aunt Lucy says in her comfortably warm yet businesslike voice. “You’re our leading experts in love affairs.”

Daisy and I look at each other. There must be fear on my face because she reaches out to take my hand, smiling at me. “Indeed we are, Aunt Lucy,” she says, acting rather like Amina when she tosses her golden hair over her shoulder. The wrinkle has appeared at the top of her nose.

Just as we’re about to sit down, there is a furious hammering at the door. Daisy and Uncle Felix both start, while Aunt Lucy hisses, “Press!”

“Let us in!” somebody yells, and I realise with a jolt that I recognise them. “There are people with cameras at the bottom of the stairs asking who we are!”

“GEORGE!” Daisy shrieks before I can pin the source of the voice. With that, she skids out of the room and to the door. Before Bridget can reach the door, Daisy throws it open dramatically and hurls herself at George, determined to show somebody — whoever they may be — that she is only a silly young girl affected by a monstrous scandal. Alexander catches my eye before I can open my mouth to ask, and gestures with a glance to somebody further out on the landing: a reporter with an enormous camera.

“Oh, George!” she cries as he clings onto the back of her blouse, making an excellent performance of crying. “I’m  _ so _ glad that you stopped to see me! I just— I have no idea what to do!”

Gruffly, with his back to the photographer, George says the beautifully scripted sentence, “Awful business, isn’t it? Well, what they do doesn’t define us, we can just stand proud and laugh it off!”

Uncle Felix appears at the door, looking grave with his monocle screwed into his eye. “Do you boys want to come in for some tea? I imagine that you’re also finding it hard to process.”

“I had no  _ idea _ ,” Daisy exclaims, and then she turns and winks at me. “Come on! I simply can’t stand to cry in public anymore!”

Alexander puts a hand on George’s back and I notice with a surprising shock that George really is crying. Given his usual smartly-polished seriousness, it astonishes me. True to how he always carries himself, he cries perfectly formally while pressing his handkerchief to his face. Alexander seems looming and protective, and it’s almost sweet.

They step over the threshold, Alexander smiling at me, and Uncle Felix moves away, leaving me to shut the door. The reporter does not move. He stands there, camera poised, and I decided to defy what Uncle Felix ordered us to do outside the Rue in May: I do not cover my face. Instead, I summon every bit of confident detective inside me and stand up tall, turning my head to look right into the camera as he takes a picture. I do not flinch against the flash, and I feel rather like Daisy. I shoot the reporter my most chilling, Daisy-ish glare, and then I turn my cheek and slam the door.

* * *

“First scandal?” Daisy asks a teary George, her eyes shining with unshed tears.

“Fuck you,” he replies in a tone just as cheery, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. “Have you discovered anything?” He stuffs his handkerchief into the pocket of his coat and scowls at her, holding out a sheaf of well-kept letters. “These may well help.”

Astonishingly, George seems to be surrendering control of the case to us. I realise that George has never had his familial secrets decorating newspaper column. Judging by the way that Alexander is retreating into his coat as if he wants to vanish,  _ he _ has dealt with it before. I wonder what business scandals look like, and if American newspapers are as callous and open as Alexander himself. I hope for his sake that they aren’t.

Nobody can work out what to say. Daisy takes the letters confidently, and it’s odd to see Harold’s side of a story that has previously only been one-perspective and two-dimensional on a piece of paper. As we stand and stare at each other, Uncle Felix appears in the doorway with a pot of tea. He is wearing an apron, his golden monocle, and a sharp waistcoat, and looks rather like some demented sort of housemaid. I have to stifle a giggle as he says, “Come on through! We’re holding a war council in the dining room and having— what is it that you call it, girls?”

“Bunbreak!” Daisy and I say at the same time, beaming at each other.

“Indeed, that’s the stuff! Do one of you boys want to run down to Tesco for biscuits?” He waves his wallet at us, cheery but not entirely happy.

“I’ll go,” Alexander volunteers, sticking up his hand.

As he hands Alexander his wallet, worn leather cracked all over, Uncle Felix winks at Daisy and I.

“Sir—” Alexander is always embarrassed around Uncle Felix and I can’t guess why. Daisy says that she can. “I mean, if you give me a list of what editions of what newspapers you already have, I can grab all the papers that you don’t have. I mean, if that would help?”

Smiling, he says, “That would be excellent, thank you, Alexander.”

“Thank you, sir!” George raises his eyebrows at Alexander, who goes quite red. Then Uncle Felix beckons us into the dining room and I start to follow Daisy, who is peering at George, but Alexander catches me by my shoulder. “Hey, Hazel.”

“Yes?” I say, and I suddenly can’t meet his eye or form a sentence

“Keep an eye on George for me, while I’m out.” His smile seems bitterly hollow, and it makes me feel quite sick. “I’m so glad to see you, you know.”

“You too, Alexander.” My voice is too small for my mouth, but he somehow still hears me. Ridiculously, it’s like he reads my mind, and I can’t pin how he’s looking at me. “I am— I mean, it’s really good to see you too.”

Glancing about, he whispers, “I can’t help George. Not with... I’ve no idea how to comfort him. I’m glad he has Daisy and you.” He goes to move towards the door but he pauses, shifts, and leans down to kiss me on the cheek.

I think that I stop breathing.

* * *

**GEORGE**

“Are you not scared?” I ask Daisy, raising my eyebrow at her. She looks so glossy and golden, really disgustingly put together. Felix looks incredibly like her, tall and blonde and twinkly despite the world collapsing about them.

She looks at Hazel, waits until she has swanned ahead. Then she says, “Terrified. But that’s not good and so I’ll bear up.”

“You’re a hot unto yourself, Madam Wells.” With that pearl of wisdom that makes her scowl at me, I walk to sit down at the table, leaving a seat between Hazel and I free for Alexander. As I take my seat, I catch sight of a newspaper clipping wearing one of the more shocking photos. I groan and cover my eyes. “Can you—” I vaguely wave my hand at the photo.

I don’t know how to explain what the photos make me feel. Even though the sight of my brother wearing so little and doing things so shocking, is unpleasant, and makes me start and flinch away, that is not why I am disgusted. Sights like that are the sorts of embarrassing and burning memories to be shoved down into your gut, the sort of things that have you with a warning to knock before throwing open doors, and an inability to look your sibling in the eye for a month. I recall the time that I stepped into my brother’s bedroom and screamed at the sight of him and another family friend being intimate, and how we haven’t talked about it since.

The angle of the photos, the way in which they are taken, so similar to how everything in my memory is filed away in black and white apart from the most important things, make me feel as if they are an embarrassing secret that Daisy and I would keep. Pictures like that are not for the world to see.

My brother, I know, would rather die than have me see photos like that. I remember how, over the summer holidays, he cried out and blushed furiously and snatched letters from my hands, swatted me over the head with the paper and locked himself away in his room. My brother is private and careful, sensitive and worrying, particular and loving. He does not deserve a scandal.

“Moral indecency, that they’re allowed to publish shit like this,” I say, and I sound more put together than I feel.

“It’s really quite horrifying, isn’t it?” Daisy says. “It’s as if the horror doesn’t properly start until you have all the pieces of the puzzle together.”

“Right.” I nod. The table feels quite far away, and that doesn’t match up with the feeling of the oak under my fingertips. The incoherency with which my thoughts come astonishes me, and they don’t seem to be translating into the things that I wish to say. I clench my fists, and I come back to the world a little as pain spikes across my skin, so I dig my nails into my palms until I feel as if I am back in the room, and the skin breaks beneath the press of my fingernails. In a flash of fury and desperation, my hand shoots out to the offending article. Smudged with blood and crumpled from my hand, the picture is turned face down.

“I can’t look at it,” I choke out. “It feels wrong.”

I realise with mounting horror that I am breaking, right here without Alexander by my side, surrounded by people that don’t know what to do. Somebody grabs my wrist — Lucy, for the press of her fingers is unfamiliar, and her grip of the style of somebody trained with restraining prisoners — and somebody else touches my shoulder, and somebody else comes into my space, reaches for me. “Please don’t touch me,” I say, and it pushes away the heat inside my head. My voice is loud and level and calm, and I am back in control, fighting into the conversation.

“I’ll get you a bandage!” Hazel gasps, rushing out of the room and into the kitchen, rifling through boxes.

“It’s a lot,” Daisy says, though she has this odd wrinkle at the top of her nose. I imagine that she is thinking, distastefully, ‘ _ Emotions’ _ . “How do you think  _ I _ feel? What a way for me to find out what — well —  _ that  _ looks like on a man!”

It’s such a surprisingly improper statement that I laugh. “ _ Daisy! _ ” I scold.

Red in the face and huffing rather, Hazel rushes back into the room with a roll of bandages. “Are you—” She pauses. “—laughing about what we were laughing about on the train?”

“Yes!” Daisy springs from her seat and grins at Hazel, snatching the bandages from her.

Lucy and Felix are pouring over the articles and I can hardly bear these photos. Over the course of the day, the papers have cycled further and further through the reams of photos. The series that the papers are focusing on right now all have my brother’s face in horrifying clarity, with Bertie Wells pressed up against him, doing… well, something. I suppose it could be kissing his neck. I don’t want to think about it.

It’s all I can think about.

His face in the photos is strange with an emotion that I don’t think he would have words for. I choose to think that it is fear, as it would be if he knew how many people were seeing him in such a private moment.

“If we’re detecting, I’ll look at the letters,” I say, and Daisy nods.

The phone rings, but Felix ignores it.

* * *

**ALEXANDER**

Despite Felix’s strict instructions, I buy more newspapers than absolutely necessary. The papers are focusing on one set of photos this afternoon, a series clearly taken all at once, and there is one particular group that makes me feel sick. They capture four expressions in the final half-second of this intimate moment frozen in a bout of forty photos.

The first is of a kiss.

The second is of Harold staring right into the camera, utterly horrified. 

The third is Bertie and Harold scrambling to get decent.

The fourth is blurred, taken accidentally as the cameraman climbed frantically down the drainpipe away from the rooms. It captures Harold, dressed in a shirt that is not his, leaning out the window in confusion and horror, looking down at the cameraman.

I snatch it up. At least, when it came to the corruption scandal, there were no pictures, only neverending reams of numbers and opinionated journalists slandering my father’s embezzling. I’m glad that I was on a boat to England three weeks after the news broke, because I know that Father wanted me to help him sweep up the pieces of the company. I don’t know if I could have refused. Hazel hasn’t asked yet why I flinch away from press cameras and know how to act when faced with a family scandal. I’m not sure that I want her to.

With a plastic carrier bag of biscuits on my arm, I go to pay the man at the kiosk for the newspaper. When I open my mouth to ask if he has enough change for the money in my hand, I am glared at rather furiously. “We don’ serve the likes of you Americans here. Put that back at once. Puffins, the lot of you.”

Strangely, the word ‘ruffian’ doesn’t hurt me as much as it does when someone directs it at George, most likely because he is in danger when people say it to him. The man gestures for me to put it back, but I can’t. I need this paper to help George and Daisy and Hazel.

In a ridiculous moment of being the sort of person that everybody believes George is, I clutch the paper harder and say, “No, I don’t think I will.”

“Ain’t you friends with that Indian kid?”

I jump and internally curse the ‘A. Arcady’ so roughly stitched into my coat by the matron at Weston. I tore my school coat beyond repair in a tousle that George started with some older boys, and I am allowed to wear a similar (“But much more fashionable,” George noted) coat of my own, on the condition that my name was stitched into the breast pocket. As usual, something to do with school has managed to do me in.

I’m suddenly spiteful. “So what?” I ask him, and then I snatch up the newspaper and take off running down the street, laughing in the face of the shouts.

* * *

I am breathless when I get back to the Mountfitchets’ flat. I rush up the stairs and bang on the door in the Junior Pinkertons fashion. From inside, I hear George say, “Alex,” and then Bridget opens the door to me.

“You’re rather flushed, Master Arcady,” she remarks, before taking my coat and hat for me.

“Thank you!” I tell her, and I smile at her before walking into the dining room. Daisy and Hazel are making notes all over the newspaper articles, directing their aunt and uncle who are clearly trying not to laugh. George is sat at the other end of the table, letters spread out around him.

“I’ve got biscuits,” I announce.

Daisy bounces up, beaming at me, and rifles through the bag until she finds the squashed fly biscuits. “YES! Finally, somebody who appreciates good biscuits.”

“They’re my favourite,” I say with a surprised laugh, upending the bag on the table and separating the newspapers from the biscuit packets.

“Traitor,” Hazel says softly. “Chocolate bourbons are way better.”

Without looking up, George reaches out for the packet I’ve opened. After the clamour of excitable biscuit-coveting has settled down, I sit down beside George. “Y’alright?” I ask him.

He shakes his head. “It almost happened, and you weren’t there.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He’s been murder-glaring anybody that goes near him for the past half an hour!” Daisy laughs, and George merely stares her down.

“Alex, it’s fine,” George tells me sternly, pushing a pile of letters towards me. “Look, help me with this. I’m trying to match up all the letters in which they’re telling us about the same thing. We’re searching for patterns, the things that they didn’t put together themselves.”

“Got it!”

Felix says, “What newspapers did you get, Alexander?”

Groaning in low turns, George leans his head against my arm, one hand pressed to his face. He isn’t fully out of the woods of his outburst just yet, and I must be careful. Across the table, Daisy and Hazel look at each other. George is stressed and upset and holding it together just barely, and he is looking painfully aware of all the attention on him. I’m going to have to whisk him out of the room soon, or he’ll run himself into a sort of shutdown. I really need George to retain his ability to speak, so I shall have to do it soon. It makes me feel a little bit sick, with how stressed he is and how I feel every bit of it.

“Daisy,” Hazel whispers. “George, he’s doing what  _ you _ do. He’s groaning.”

“Maybe he gets… overwhelmed in the same way as me,” Daisy replies, and then she squeezes Hazel’s hand.

I smile, and then I see George staring at the photos, and I have to reply to Felix to distract him. “They’re still on the same cycle of photos,” I explain. “But I found the most extraordinary article.”

“Go on, Alex,” George says, and he sparkles ever so slightly. Reaching for the newspaper at the top of the haphazard pile I made, I say, “From the  _ Five Ladies Gazette _ .”

“Named after the canonical five victims of Jack The Ripper,” he notes with approval.

“The first feminist newspaper to become popular in London, overlooked for having female journalists because they report on crime,” Daisy adds, and they regard each other with an air of respect. “Now, let’s hear how they’ve slandered Bertie and Harold.”

George winces. I pick up the paper and begin to read. “‘Is the scandal justified? With the entirety of Britain scrambling to pick apart the lives of two scholars, another question looms that nobody is answering: is the nation’s enraptured attention being misdirected?’”

Daisy looks shocked for a moment before schooling her face into careful dismissal. Hazel’s eyes are wide, and they sparkle at me. I catch her eye and smile at her, and she looks down in what seems like alarm before looking back at me. She smiles back and I must be going red. “Alex,” George says, and raises his eyebrows at me in a way that I know means that he is sentencing us to a conversation about this later on. “Carry on.”

# IS THE SCANDAL JUSTIFIED?

_With the entirety of Britain scrambling to pick apart the lives of two scholars, another question looms that nobody is answering: is the nation’s enraptured attention being misdirected?_

Although these letters and photos have disgraced a romantic Cambridge dalliance, a far more sinister secret lurks beneath the black and white — who did this? They have claimed not an ounce of fame, nor have they requested monetary compensation. This raises the question of why, what they gained from chasing Wells and Mukherjee from Cambridge and no doubt forcing the most unimaginable awful traumas to befall their already mocked and bullied young siblings.

It is the author’s guess that the mystery photographer was making an effort to blackmail the pair, whether that be for money or influence, expecting Mukherjee and Wells to be able to fetch and carry whatever they wanted. Unfortunately for all concerned, it seems that Wells and Mukherjee were unable to provide what was requested for them, and the photos were released to the newspapers, and the photos seized after the discovery of the photos.

Although the rest of the world has pounced upon to letters with a wicked and critical eye, they can be read as an example of beautiful love letters, and choosing to regard them that way is difficult but well worth it, in the author’s opinion, as that only makes the situation more real and heartbreaking.

In one letter, Mukherjee wrote,  _ ‘Reading so many letters in class, lilting love letters and secret notes. The authors would never have intended for their writings to be seen, analysed, torn apart. What is to become of the things we write to each other, the secrets we intend for nobody else? I cannot help but feel the urge to burn these letters and run from the fear of it all becoming too much. Pray tell, dear, does that fear make me a coward? _

The cruel irony of this fear cannot be ignored or forgotten, and is yet succeeding to add more tragedy to this tale.

_ Fear is natural and not always unfounded, not when we have seen so many like us ruined, slandered, and tortured for love,  _ is Wells’ written reply.  _ I am sure that men like us often are overcome by moments of cowardice. There is no sense in never-ending bravery, and it is simply unrealistic to expect such a thing. Neither of us are invincible, my hear. I would leave everything behind in an instant to ensure our safety, and so your fears are matched by my own. _

The fact is that, through these letters, we can witness the mounting fear that the pair experienced, and how they comforted each other only to have their worries proven true. While Wells and Mukherjee have fled Cambridge and possibly the country, the perpetrator of this invasive crime roams free.

In one letter, Harold Mukherjee cruelly predicted the country’s response to their relationship:  _ I believe that the world is just by nature, but you and I are seldom defended by the laws of our own free country. _

written by Christine Ahuja

Felix, Lucy, Daisy, and Hazel are staring at me, electrified by the article that I read aloud, and my own emotions mirror theirs. George is almost glowing. “Christine Ahija, the first British Indian woman to report on crime and social issues. Her articles never disappoint.”

Suddenly, Hazel says, “Oh!”

“What is it, Watson?” Daisy asks at once.

“She’ll, the journalist, be on our side, right?” she asks breathlessly.

I nod, and so does Daisy, though I still can’t see where Hazel is taking this. I trust that it’s somewhere brilliant.

Excited and gesturing in a way that is quite like Daisy, she says, “We can write to her and ask for her for the letter that was sent along with the photos—”

“—And see what we can deduce from it!” Daisy finishes. “Watson, you genius!”

George rolls his eyes as they grin at each other.

* * *

As we debate over the phrasing of our letter, Hazel noting it all down as we bat ideas back and forth, George drums his fingers on the tabletop.

“Are you okay?” I ask him softly, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“Alright,” he replies, but he sounds tense. “Don’t— I’ll tell you if I need to leave.”

I nod. “I trust you.”

“And so you damn well should,” he replies with a grin. At that moment, before I can laugh and shoved him, somebody hammers on the door.

Felix ignores it.

They carry on.

Lucy tells them to go and do something extremely rude.

Then somebody calls out, “Too busy for company, are you?”

George notes in shocked tones, “You’ve got somebody rather foreign at your front door.”

Making eye contact, Hazel and I share a rather knowing look speaking of the countries written on our passports.

“They sort of sound like  _ you _ , Hazel!” Daisy remarks with a laugh in her voice.

“Wait!” Hazel jumps to her feet and rushes past Bridget, out of the room. “It’s quite alright!”

Before anybody can stop her, she throws open the door and says, “Why on earth didn’t you telephone?”

“We tried,” says Alfred Cheng. “You wouldn’t pick up.”

* * *

_ “they would boo that, they’d abuse that, it’s a cultural hold-back” _


	7. alone is safer than with you

_“i like you inconveniently”_

* * *

**HAZEL**

Amanda Price and Alfred Cheng are sitting travel-ruffled at the dining room table, and I can’t quite believe that they’re here.

“Did I meet you two at Christmas?” Uncle Felix asks.

Alfred nods, stretching out languidly and running a hand through his hair. “Indeed you did, sir. I was almost arrested for the crime.”

“And thank goodness that you weren’t!” Aunt Lucy says. “I think we all know how the justice system tolerates those who do not look British.”

Alfred nods. He knows all too well. I didn’t see it myself, but I heard from my father about how the Hong Kong papers talked of his uncle’s death, how the white man who killed him may have been justified. The partiality to Europeans sits under the skin of every part of the word that the British have managed to reach, and George and Alfred know it all too well. I remember being told when I was smaller and standing next to the much paler Victoria Cheng, that I should not get so tan. My mother would laugh and say that I spent too much time sitting in sunny places and reading, and asked why I didn’t make more of an effort to look like Victoria. She gave me a wobbling smile, and I knew that she did not understand it either.

I have known Alfred since I was a little girl, and his cousin Victoria is the very reason that I was ever sent to Deepdean in the first place. He still intimidates me a little bit, as if I am still a little girl wearing a mock-Western party dresses, staring up at a much older boy with dark hair and an actual jawline, and he is asking for my cake.

“Your brother says that you’ve been shot at,” Alfred says to George.

He winces but says, “Yes. Well, _he_ was. He’s never let the coppers get to me.”

“He’s a good man, your brother.”

“He is indeed.” George turns a letter towards Alfred and Amanda questioningly. “Freddy Savage and James Monmouth? They get a mention but not enough for Harold to bother explaining who they are.”

“They’re in our staircase.”

Amanda speaks up for the first time. “Savage is a damn brute but Bertie seems to like him,” she says bitterly. “And Monmouth is a dreadful flirt who calls me a piece of skirt and a brama, and is utterly awful to Alfred and Harold.”

Seeing my look of confusion, Daisy sighs and explains, “A brama is a very pretty girl. The word is taken from Hinduism, actually. Well, nicked, I should say.”

George raises his eyebrows at her approvingly, and she sticks her tongue out at him.

“Are they rich?” I ask, thinking of Daisy’s mental dictionary of British families.

Daisy snorts. “Are they _ever_? Monmouth’s family made their money dirty hundreds of years ago and everybody knows it. They profited from the treatment of the Indian people. I’ve heard that James Monmouth is trying to divorce himself from his folks and make some honest money, but it wouldn’t shock me if he’s as crooked as the lot of them.”

Once again, George looks pleased and surprised. “You’ve become notably less obnoxiously colonisers-can-do-no-wrong since we first met, Wells.”

“I do let people make an impression on me now and then, Mukherjee.”

“What about the Savages?” Alexander asks, and he looks at Daisy in an admiring way that makes the middle of my chest hurt. Then he turns and smiles at me, and I notice the way that the mark at the side of his mouth moves as his lips turn up. I realise at once that I’m staring at his lips, and turn away with burning cheeks.

Consulting her mention dictionary, the wrinkle at the top of her nose smooths out and her eyes look very blue “His family live in… Somerset or Dorset, I believe. The one where they all have ridiculous accents. But anyway, the Savages are just that — _Savages_. Their family was rich until an embezzlement scandal four years ago, and they’ve been trying to rebuild their reputation ever since. Badly, I should mention.”

Gesturing quite suddenly, Alexander says, “I heard about that!”

“Why on earth did the Monmouth scandal make its way to America? I would think that you have enough interesting things to talk about,” Daisy asks, raising an eyebrow.

Pulling an odd face that is just a little peculiarly less than cheery, Alexander says, “Massachusetts just… really like embezzlement scandals back then.”

Uncle Felix claps his hands. “No use dawdling! Hazel, finish off that letter. Alexander, Amanda, can one of you run to post it when we’re done? And did you bring along those letters that you saved from the police?”

They look at each other, and then Amanda reaches for her suitcase. She opens it to show an inconspicuous variety of items, the sort an unassuming scholar would carry about. Daisy makes an approving noise at how she has made it all ordinary. Then Amanda tugs at the lining and it comes away easily, and what looks like hundreds of letters are revealed, packed into the lining of her case. Her and Alfred start picking them up, putting them on the table one pile at a time.

“Here,” Amanda says, pushing one small collection of letters towards George, who picks up the letter at the top of the pile. “They’re in order by date. They wrote each other letters even while at Cambridge together, so there’s a lot of them. I’ve plucked out the explicit ones but—”

“Eugh!” George bursts out, and flies into an odd flurry of covering his eyes and frantically trying to bat the offending letter as far away as possible.

“—I might have missed some,” Amanda finishes faintly.

I take it and there are words that I don’t quite know the meanings of despite all the books I read, but I understand enough of the words surrounding them to guess at the intentions and I blush furiously. Daisy peers over, regards the letter, and says, “Oh, _impropriety_!” in a teasing voice. Then she pulls a face, says, “Ah, I see. Oh—” She hurriedly lets go of the letter and Alexander picks it up, sensibly passing it back to Amanda instead of reading it. 

“You aren’t the ones who had to sift through this madness. I shall never be able to look either of them in the eye again,” Alfred says with a grin.

“Congratulations, I now miss my brother slightly less,” George mutters.

I reach tentatively for the first pile of letters and Daisy does the same. She sighs and lets me grab a letter, and I can tell that she is anxious. Not that she will ever say it. “Let’s get started, Watson! No use dilly-dallying!” I don’t think that Daisy Wells has ever dilly-dallied in her life.

It was written, I notice, in January 1936, from Bertie to Harold while we were in London for Uncle Felix’s wedding. It is lighthearted, friendly, and flirtatious, and reading it makes me feel as if I am listening in to somebody’s conversation.

_Dear H,_

_Things in London are without incident so far, thank goodness. After yet more murders, I think that I am quite cured of incidents. Trouble follows Daisy and Hazel like murders seem to follow me, so I doubt that this peace will last for long. You’ll have me back in a week, though I may need a day or two to recover from the tremendous amount that I’m going to drink in order to deal with my family. My parents were sent an invitation, though I doubt that they’ll attend._

_How is it in Cambridge? It must be terribly boring with me beside you. I hope that George and Alexander are keeping you company. I’ve been planning climbing routes and I have an excellent one for Senate House when we are back together. I’ve also been actually reading Manda’s history notes so I won’t be totally lost when we get back; I had no clue that we were studying the American Revolution. I promise that I’ll pay more attention when you talk about history from here on out._

_I cannot wait to see you again, as awfully teenage as that sounds._

_In haste to dinner,_

_Bertie_

_P.S.: Sending plenty of kisses because to hell with those who say they men like us are grubby and unromantic._

Daisy looks positively enraptured. I cannot pin down why until she takes my hand and, without looking away from the letter, whispers, “ _Hazel_.”

I understand in an instant. She is astonished by the people so much like her, blatantly loving each other across pieces of paper in front of her eyes. With men and women alike sharing her sort of love, and being shocked, humiliated, and bullied for it, seeing such an open sort of love must be quite overwhelming. I have always taken for granted the luck of my sort of love, the fact that a confession is never impossible beyond the ordinary. I have always been afraid of Alexander cruelly rejecting me (in the moments that I have thought about confessing) , but never have I considered how that is for Daisy: to ask somebody of the same gender to return her affections is to take a chance, putting herself in possible danger every time another soul finds out about how she experiences love.

“I know,” I reply, and I squeeze her hand.

* * *

**GEORGE**

I am reading the letter that was written as a response to the one that Hazel holds in her hands, and it makes me despise the dalliance that caused this scandal a little bit less. Alexander is scouting through the later letters for mentions of Cambridge acquaintances, nothing down every mention of them in his shorthand notebook. I ought to be helping Alex but I have done enough already, in my opinion. Even I know when to admit that my detecting is not entirely up to my usual standards. When I don’t admit it, Alex notices anyway.

My brother is always sweet and careful with his relationships, it seems. Despite what seems to me like rather excessive experience for somebody like them, he tackles each one with boyish excitement — or so I have observed over the last five years of his relationships.

_Dear Bertie,_

_I’m so glad that nothing eventful has befallen you in London. The boys have found another case to detect, and I am politely pretending that I have no idea about it. The don of our staircase, Woodards, has been behaving beyond erratic recently. George and Alexander are having excellent fun detecting, and they’re simultaneously relieved and upset that the girls are not here making their job ever-harder._

_I’m sorry about your parents. I can’t imagine what such cruel dismissal feels like and believe me when I say that I have tried. I want to understand you, Bertie, and I’ll damn do it or suffer trying._

_Do let me know how the lead up to the wedding goes. You should get this in the evening post because I am planning to rush this letter into the return post, so we can correspond daily. I’m sure that you shall look rather criminally handsome in your suit as a groomsman, you always do look dashing in suits._

_When you get back, we must go to Fitzbillies. I know that it’s expensive but I would dearly like a date with you. I suppose that this is me asking you out for the first time, isn’t it? How odd. Anyhow—_

_Bertie Wells, will you go on a date with me?_

_I look forward to our climb. We don’t have to take the others, do we? Also, is Amanda in our climbing group now?_

_Yours,_

_H._

_P.S.: Much appreciated, love X_

“I’m off to deliver this myself,” Lucy says, standing up after sealing the letter that Hazel wrote.

We all look at each other. Now all we can do is wait. Every lead seems to be a dead end and nobody has hit upon anything conclusive. The four of us, I know, are thinking that we need to get in a room alone. Despite being allowed to detect, we feel odd detecting in front of such a crowd, as if we must fight to impress them. ‘Two suspects,’ Daisy mouths at us all, and I agree.

Freddy Savage and James Monmouth.

* * *

**HAZEL**

We gather up the mentions of our suspects and write them up in my casebook, and it turns into something of a war counsel. Alfred and Amanda offer to tackle the more shocking letters that they wrote to each other, reading through their fingers and occasionally groaning in a way that makes me glad I am not the one reading them. Felix reads their other letters to each other, and we pick apart their letters to us. We are almost silent, except for somebody saying, “Got one!” or one of us swearing at the fact that a letter doesn’t contain any mentions of them, and Uncle Felix reprimanding the offender.

We gather an impressive list over two hours, combing through their letters to us and their letters to each other. Even when we only look at the mentions taken from their letters to us, James Monmouth sounds like an unsavoury type.

_Daisy, I swear that James Monmouth — a boy from my staircase — knows about Harold and I._

_Monmouth has purchased a camera; it is as if he’s trying to be as scholarly as possible._

_You will never believe this, but history repeated itself — Monmouth pitched off of the drainpipe outside our room. Goodness knows why he was climbing up there!_

_Alfred nearly knocked out James Monmouth this evening, while opening the window to my rooms. We were having a beer and studying, but that quite ruined our night. Savage was on the scene in an instant, it’s as if he has a tracker of some sort on the man._

_Remember how I mentioned that I shall never go out drinking again? I believe that Monmouth should take up that oath as well — he almost strangled Savage in a fight today, and Manda says that she heard him say, “Savage, if you know anything—”_

I thought that Freddy Savage might be a little better but reading all the quotes together made me feel even worse, as if Lysander was a student, or a bullying scholar.

_Bug, surely you remember the daughter of the tall, fair doctor in Dad’s department? If I didn’t know better, I would swear that Savage is a relation to her: he has the oddest and most creeping smile._

_Goodness, Daisy, do remind me to never be as drunk as that around my friends anymore. According to Alfred, who has been avoiding my eye, I did not say anything too terrible. I’m not sure that I believe him. Savage has been looking at me askance all day._

_ Savage called Harold and I ‘rulebreaking chaps’, and I don’t know whether he means the climbing or the relationship. We’re assuming the climbing. _

_Monmouth is swearing that Savage has stolen his satchel and we all think he’s a nutter. Everybody watched our new staircase don confiscate it last week._

_Bertie walked up to me this morning and said that he thinks Monmouth and Savage are stalking each other, to which I hit him over the head with a textbook. Daisy and Hazel have had a ridiculous effect on him; he looks for mystery everywhere._

_Freddy Savage didn’t drink a drop, the spoilsport. Of course, H didn’t either, but that’s different._

I have never seen two people look more guilty.

* * *

**DAISY**

Aunt Lucy returns triumphantly two hours later with three pieces of paper, having marched right into the offices of the newspaper and demanding to speak with the author of the article. “Christine Ahuja gladly handed it over!” she declares, waving them about her head before throwing them down on the table. “Here is your excellent letter back, Hazel, it did wonders for convincing her.”

Hazel shifts in that Hazel-ish way she does when she doesn’t think that she deserves the praise, and smiles up through her lashes. “Thank you, Aunt Lucy.”

“Don’t be a chump,” I whisper. “Of course it’s good.”

Before she addresses the matter of the letter that we so desperately want to read — I am impatient and grown-ups, even Aunt Lucy, are just so _slow_ , she hands George a piece of paper, neatly written upon by a typist. “I say,” George says, turning the paper towards Alexander, “this would infuriate Harold, me getting things like this early.”

It’s the first time that I’ve heard him say his brother’s name today, and there is probably an infuriatingly emotional reason for it.

“It’s an early article,” he tells us, turning the paper towards us. “Racism in the school system.”

“Wonderful!” Hazel says, clapping her hands. “Aunt Lucy, what spiffing work!”

“Good shout,” Alexander says appreciatively. “That’s wizard.”

Uncle Felix makes an approving sound, while Alfred Cheng makes a grab for it. As everybody else is distracted, both myself and Alexander make a grab for the letter. I get there first.

“So,” I say importantly, because I am, straightening it out, “this is our biggest piece of evidence yet. This is the letter that the culprit wrote to the newspapers along with the letters.”

“We _know_ ,” George says in a bullying voice. “Go on, read it!”

I scowl at him with my most brilliant death glare, and even Alexander withers. Alfred Cheng snaps his fingers. “Break up the tension, I put up with enough of that from your brothers. Come on, we’ve a case to solve.”

For a second, I turn my glare on him before looking down at the paper in my hands. “To whom it may concern—”


	8. am i the boy you dreamed of?

_“do you believe in love?”_

* * *

To whom it may concern,

I have been made aware of a brewing scandal in the form of a ‘romantic’ scholarly dalliance between the nation’s pitied Fallingford victim, and the son of the first Indian to be knighted in the medical profession.

The rulebreaking chaps have become daring recently, taking ‘dates’ together in public cafes and stealing astonishing kisses in libraries. I have taken the liberty of taking possession of a camera to capture photographic evidence of their so-called relationship. The stoutly determined bluestocking that they are friends with took the liberty of right hooking me in the jaw when I innocently inquired about their relationship in an effort to rid Cambridge of such shocking behaviour. The Chinese that they also hang about with yielded no results — he simply threatened to repeat the atrocities of that winter upon me if I dared imply such things — and so it was almost my duty to take matters into my own hands.

I expect no payment for this; in fact, it is my absolute pleasure to rid the world of two more sodomites.

**HAZEL**

“Oh, stop!” I tell Daisy, pushing at her hands to stop her reading on. “Don’t, I can’t listen to that anymore!”

Alexander looks quite sick to match my own horror. “Crikey,” he murmurs, one hand pressed over his mouth.

“How is it signed?” George asks, and he looks quite pale despite his set jaw.

“Nothing. Well, it says ‘yours, a scholar’.” Daisy sets the paper down as far away from her as she can reach, and then she takes my hand. Her grip is painfully hard and I know that she is masking her real feelings towards the author of that letter.

“Inspiring stuff,” Uncle Felix says archly, adjusting his monocle. “How much I would like to burn that letter, I cannot express.”

Aunt Lucy regards the letter with the same distaste as she regarded anything particularly unsavoury that the dogs did at Fallingford.

“It fits more with our evidence for Monmouth,” Daisy says, determined to remove all emotions from it. I see how very blue her eyes are, shining with unshed tears, and I know that she needs this distraction. 

“I wonder,” Alfred says, “if you’re only suspecting Monmouth because he’s a heavy-set redhead from a poor background.”

Daisy flinches. “How _dare_ you?”

“It would be two for two,” he continues, oblivious to how Daisy balls up her hand into a fist, ready to swing it at his nose.

“We do not,” Uncle Felix booms, drawing himself up and staring down at Alfred through his monocle, “talk lightly of Fallingford.”

Sucking in an anxious breath as his eyes grow wide, Alfred half-squeaks, “Got it.”

We all pause and stare around at each other. 

“Hang on,” Alexander says, reaching out for the paper. “Eh— sorry, Daisy, can I look?”

With an annoyed noise, Daisy lets him take the letter. “Oh, go on, then.”

With glittering eyes and his tongue sticking out (I look away when George notices me focusing on his face, and raises an eyebrow), Alexander looks impossibly concentrated, holding the paper and angling it particularly. “There!”

“What is it?” Daisy asks quite rudely. I nudge her with my elbow.

“Look.” Alexander gestures for us to look at the paper and, when the three of us crowd around him — Uncle Felix and Aunt Lucy giving us a peculiar look, while Alfred and Amanda exchange glances — I see at once what he means.

Impressed upon the back of the letter is an entire paragraph, slightly slanted, as if somebody jotted a note or the start of an essay on entirely another piece of paper while resting on top of this one. “Here,” Alexander says, though he squints and the paper wobbles a little. “I’ll read it out.”

_You should not assume that those you like are right. It is not a stride forwards to support sodomites, but a step back into the dark ages. Unlike you think, you do not know what I need, what it means to me. There is nothing you could possibly say that would convince me of your so-called cause. Arguments run dry once you realise that I am correct._

_I am ousting lawbreakers and making Cambridge a cleaner place, and we shall be all the better for it. Even if they give me what I need, and you shall never know what my aim is, I will send these photos to the papers faster than you would think possible. They deserve this, in a way that those who have strayed from righteous ways could never understand._

_Tread carefully, Monmouth. I am sure that you have secrets that could be captured with a camera._

“Savage,” I breathe.

“You know,” Amanda says, holding up a letter of Bertie’s that we had taken a quote about Freddy Savage, “I figured it out about three minutes ago.”

“How?” Uncle Felix asks, ready to point an accusing finger. He really is as bad as Daisy and Bertie, no matter what he says.

“Dear,” Aunt Lucy murmurs, a hand on his arm. “We talked about the ‘jumping to conclusions’ thing.”

Alexander muffles a giggle.

Holding out the letter, Amanda says, “Savage called them ‘rulebreaking chaps’, just like the letter did.”

Alfred roars with laughter and even Daisy giggles. Uncle Felix’s ears go quite red, and Aunt Lucy looks as knowing and pleased as she did at Cambridge. “How do we call this in, then?” asks Alexander, and he catches my eye. I smile at him, and he returns it, and it feels as if I have breathed in a storybook sort of fairy dust.

“We aren’t dispatching this to the _police_!” Aunt Lucy says in horror, as if she isn’t a member of the Metropolitan Police Force herself. I don’t think that she remembers a time that she wasn’t being pulled into Uncle Felix’s organisation. “That would be ghastly! I shall make the arrest myself!”

Uncle Felix gives her a very married look. “He’s _besotted_ ,” Daisy whispers to me, rolling her eyes. “He— why, he looks at her like Alexander looks at _you_!”

Alexander grins at us as the four adults leave the room, arguing over the best way to get to Cambridge. “I like your uncle, Daisy. He really is just like you.”

* * *

Alfred won the argument and nobody was surprised, and we are hurtling towards Cambridge in two separate motorcars before I can even begin to process the shock of solving the case.

“This is marvellous!” Alexander shouts, and I turn to see him holding onto his hat and laughing into the wind, clearly enjoying the thrill of the open-top car. “Isn’t it, Hazel?”

I love Daisy more than anybody in the world, but I feel rather bitter when I recall how she climbed into the rented motorcar beside George and shut the door. They even got the car that Aunt Lucy was driving.

“Um— yes!” I lie, feeling quite sick. I duck down my head out of the wind so I can think more clearly, and he does the same.

“Calmer out of the wind,” he chuckles, and I feel my face heat up. “Not nearly as exciting, though. Do cars make you sick?”

I nod. “Cars, and trains, and boats. I’ve never been in an aeroplane but I assume it would have the same effect.”

“Pity. Though you were marvellous on the Orient Express! Did you really feel ill the whole time?” His blue eyes were wide and searching, and I find myself answering his questions and telling him stories, and he laughs and tells me his own in return. I teach him how to say ‘hello’ in Cantonese, and he teaches me how to say his name in Russian. When we arrive in Cambridge, Amanda having finished reading a textbook and Uncle Felix alarmingly low on petrol, I couldn’t care less how the case turned out. We have done our bit in solving it, after all, and Alexander Arcady is smiling at me.

* * *

**DAISY**

We are in Cambridge, peering through the tinted windows of a car to watch an arrest be made, and Hazel won’t stop smiling at Alexander Arcady.

“Hazel!” I snap, jabbing her in the side. She winces as if I am not perfectly careful to never poke her too hard. “Don’t you want to watch Freddy Savage get arrested?”

“I do,” George says. We are all peering out of the tinted side windows of one of the cars. Hazel is in the passenger seat, and I am sitting on the armrest between the driver’s seat and the passenger seat. George and Alexander are in the back, George’s breath misting up the window. “Oh, Alex, shut up. Just _look_.”

Freddy Savage is a slicked-back a drawling young man with a head of curly dark hair and long, pointed features. Aunt Lucy, looking decidedly ordinary as she dawdled with a newspaper on the corner, leaps forward and seizes his wrist. Swearing and twisting his arm, Savage tries to get free. Though I will never admit it to Hazel, my heart is in my throat. He is such a fierce, sharp, angry young man. I imagine him catching me kissing somebody — a girl, maybe _Amina_ — with a camera in his hand, and the thought makes me sick.

“As a member of the London Metropolitan Police,” Aunt Lucy says, and she suddenly looks awfully professional, “I am ordering you to accompany me to London.” Uncle Felix, from where he is sitting on the bonnet of the other motorcar and watching her, looks quite annoyingly enamoured.

Fierce, she continues and practically spits the words into his face. He looks almost scared, but I know that it is all an act. The awful things that he wrote about sodomy and _rulebreaking chaps_ are there inside my mind when I close my eyes. “You are under arrest on charges of obscenity and harassment, to name the ones that I can think of right now. Are you willing to accompany me, or shall I have to force you?”

He tries to make a break for it. Aunt Lucy grabs his arm and twists it behind his back, and I hear his groan of pain from where we are parked on the pavement. Aunt Lucy leads him to the car that Uncle Felix is lounging on as if sunbathing on a particularly hot summer day, and shoves him into the backseat. Theatrically, Uncle Felix produces a pair of cuffs and hands them to Aunt Lucy before opening the door and allowing her to climb into the drivers’ seat.

And that, as Hazel would say, is that.

* * *

Except for one more thing. A week later, at Deepdean, just as I have finished writing a letter to Uncle Felix explaining that _no_ , I don’t know where Bertie is _yes_ , I’m being honest, Hazel rushes up the stairs and into our dorm with a small and rather tattered envelope in her hand. I open it, feeling a rush that I know means that my idea is right, and read the note inside.

_Dear Daisy,_

_I am alright. We reached France without issue and, after a rocky week in a hotel unable to reach England on the telephone or transfer our money into euros, we managed to find somewhere to stay. It’s absolutely tiny but you will be glad to know that nobody recognises us here. We are perfectly alright, though shocked by the scandal. Harold is going to enrol in a course to finish his degree, which he can hopefully complete without attending in-person classes. There is this brilliant system he has discovered where they simply send you all the work and you send it back, and not a word has to be spoken aloud._

_I am not too fussed about finishing my education myself. Harold just looked over my shoulder — it’s hard not to, it’s two strides to the other side of the room — and told me that I sound like a housewife. He isn’t wrong, honestly._

_He has written to George quite separately, so you shouldn’t worry._

_I love you dearly, Daisy, and I am sorry for putting all this upon you. I’ve enclosed an envelope with the address written on the front with Hazel’s excellent lemon ink recipe. Write back soon, so I know that you are safe._

_All my love,  
_ _Bertie._


End file.
